The Half-Century Anniversary of “Dr. Strangelove”

“Mein Führer, I can walk!” screams Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers), the ex-Nazi nuclear scientist, rising from his wheelchair to salute the American President at the climax of “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” Stanley Kubrick’s satirical masterpiece is now a half century old (Film Forum will be playing a new 35-mm. print starting this Friday), and it remains as outrageously prankish, juvenile, and derisive as ever. Which, given the subject of nuclear annihilation, is exactly right. The movie is an apocalyptic sick joke: the demented general Jack Ripper (Sterling Hayden), who thinks the Commies are using fluoridation to destroy his bodily fluids (he withholds his essence from women), dispatches a group of B-52s loaded with H-bombs to destroy Soviet targets. President Merkin Muffley (Sellers again) tries to recall them; he even helps the Soviet Union to destroy some of the planes. But, after all sorts of misadventures, one B-52 gets through, setting off a Soviet-built Doomsday Machine—chained nuclear explosions assembled in a stunningly beautiful montage, accompanied by Vera Lynn singing the tender ballad “We’ll Meet Again (Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When).”

Just before rising from his chair, Strangelove (born Merkwürdigliebe) struggles with a mechanical arm, sheathed in black, which has an uncontrollable tendency to shoot up in a Nazi salute, or to seize him in a death grip around the throat. Sellers, always smiling, speaks in a heavily sibilant German accent, his voice pitched high and sometimes rising to a happy shriek. An Americanized Nazi in love with death was the kind of joke made by the more knowing American schoolboys in the fifties and early sixties. Mock German accents resounded on schoolyard playgrounds (cripple jokes, too). We all knew (perhaps a little vaguely) that Wernher von Braun, an actual Nazi who created the V-2 rocket that terrorized London at the end of the war, had become a leading American rocket scientist. Some of us wondered which was worse, his opportunism or America’s. The satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer, tinkling at the piano, devoted a piece to von Braun, with the following lyric: “Vonce der rockets are up / Who cares vhere dey come down / That’s not my department / Says Wernher von Braun.” The German émigré scientist was a prime source of Sellers’s Strangelove (not, as people later assumed, Henry Kissinger, who was young and relatively unknown in the early sixties).

America had become an obsessively anti-Communist national-security state. Twenty-four hours a day, at least a few bombers, fully loaded with nuclear weapons, were aloft, as a way of warding off a Soviet sneak attack. The strategist Herman Kahn, in a notorious book, “On Thermonuclear War,” published in 1960, insisted that a nuclear war was winnable, and that life would go on despite millions dead and nuclear radiation everywhere. In the movie, George C. Scott’s General Buck Turgidson, the Air Force Chief of Staff, advocates for war as follows: “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say that no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops—depending on the breaks.” And Kahn later proposed a doomsday device as the ultimate deterrent: threatening the extinction of human, animal, and plant life, he believed, would end the dangerous brinkmanship displayed by the Soviet Union and the United States in the Cuban missile crisis. He thought that it was a reasonable idea, even a clever one.

All of this was, so to speak, in the air. So were many kinds of ridicule in response—not just schoolboy pranks but the disbelieving complaints of liberal intellectuals at dinner parties, cabaret sketch humor, scabrous Off-Broadway plays, Norman Mailer’s rants against technology, and, most of all, the nihilistic funning of Mad, which had started as a comic book in 1952 and become, a decade later, a nagging presence in American humor. Mad made indiscriminate fun of everybody and everything. Growing up fast and hard in New York in the late forties and early fifties, and scraping around the edges of photojournalism, Kubrick the young filmmaker was certainly aware of all this. For “Strangelove,” he distilled the essence of hipster disgust: the only sane response to the prospect of nuclear annihilation was ridicule and black farce. Columbia Pictures produced the movie; nothing like “Strangelove” had ever been made before by big-studio Hollywood.

It may be hard to believe now, but Kubrick’s original intention was to do a straight, serious movie. In the late fifties, he became obsessed with the possibility of an accidental nuclear war (he even thought of leaving New York for the greater safety of Australia). In 1959, he bought the rights to a 1958 novel called “Red Alert,” by a former British R.A.F. pilot and intelligence officer named Peter George. “Red Alert” provides the ground plan for “Strangelove” (crazy general, American-Soviet coöperation, etc.), but it was dead serious, and it ends with a big sigh of relief—the rogue aircraft does not launch its bombs. In this same period, Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler were working on their novel “Fail-Safe,” which was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in October, 1962, right in the middle of the Cuban missile crisis. “Fail-Safe” begins with the accidental launch of a thermonuclear attack by the United States and ends with the mutually agreed-upon destruction of Moscow and New York—a fair trade between America and the Soviet Union, intended to prevent a larger war. This, I suppose, might also count as a happy ending. Sidney Lumet soon signed on as the director of a sombre movie version starring Henry Fonda. (“Fail-Safe” came out after “Strangelove” and flopped.)

Kubrick did enormous amounts of research. He read forty-six books on nuclear strategy; he conferred with experts, including the dread Herman Kahn; he studied military magazines to get an idea of how the cockpit of a B-52 might look. As he began working on the screenplay with Peter George, however, he gagged on the idea of a straight version of the material. As he said later:

My idea of doing it as a nightmare comedy came in the early weeks of working on the screenplay. I found that in trying to put meat on the bones and to imagine the scenes fully, one had to keep leaving out of it things which were either absurd or paradoxical, in order to keep it from being funny; and these things seemed to be close to the heart of the scenes in question…. The things you laugh at were really the heart of the paradoxical practices that make a nuclear war possible.

So he stopped leaving out “things which were either absurd or paradoxical.” In the movie, the planes can be recalled only with special codes that the mad general will not release; the Doomsday Machine cannot be stopped once it is triggered. And so on. Each element makes some sort of sense in itself as strategy, but, in the aggregate, they produce an insane system of interlocking absolutes. Kubrick’s purpose, of course, was to reduce and humiliate the Strangelovian planners like Kahn and their military bullyboys. George C. Scott’s General Turgidson is an example of delusional paranoia—not at all stupid, but contemptuous, insanely competitive, and physically frat-boy-ish, his neck jerked off the vertical, arms snapping like semaphores. When his bikini-babe mistress calls him in a tense moment in the Pentagon war room, he says into the phone, with indignation, “Of course it isn’t only physical. I deeply respect you as a human being.”

Some of the wilder riffs may have been provided by Terry Southern, the profane literary bad boy (the author of “The Magic Christian” and, with Mason Hoffenberg, the porno-spoof “Candy”). As the script was nearing completion, Kubrick, at the recommendation of Peter Sellers, called in Southern, who, in a pressured six weeks, kept up with the director’s manic energy by consuming the amphetamine “diet pill” Dexamyl; sometimes the two men worked together in the back of an old Bentley as Kubrick was driving to the studio. On the set, Kubrick allowed Sellers to improvise in rehearsals, and then Kubrick would take the best of Sellers’s improvisations, write them into the script, and shoot them. The finished script, submitted to the ineffable judgment of the M.P.A.A.’s Production Code Administration, met with a reception only slightly less bizarre than some of the satirical riffs in the movie itself. Geoffrey Shurlock, who administered the code, complained of the use of “hell” and “damn” and warned against a too-revealing bikini worn by General Turgidson’s mistress; he also objected to the inclusion of prophylactics among the gear given to the B-52 crew. This in a film about annihilation! Shurlock’s difficulties (most of which Kubrick ignored) suggest how many squares remained to be conquered by the movie.

Kubrick wanted to shoot in New York, but no sound stage was big enough for the Pentagon war room, where much of the film is set, so he went back to England, where he had shot his previous film, “Lolita” (he never really returned to the United States). Almost the entire film was shot at Shepperton Studios, outside London, where Ken Adam, the brilliant production designer on several of the Bond films, created the war room as a monster a hundred and thirty feet long, a hundred feet wide, and thirty-five feet high. In the center, the President and his advisers sit at an enormous circular table. Kubrick and Adam wanted to suggest a slightly loony forum, a place where furious debates over the future of existence would take place. An atmosphere of science-fiction irreality would be punctuated by preposterous intrusions of everyday life: the petulance of the President; his wheedling conversations on the telephone with Kissoff, the Soviet Premier; the squabbles, tantrums, and jockeying for position among diplomats and military men; the petty human ego struggling for precedence right up to the moment of apocalypse.

Kubrick was thirty-six when “Strangelove” came out. It was the last movie directed by the young Kubrick—the ace filmmaker who put emotions right on the surface and moved quickly through charged narratives. He was superseded by the “visionary” Kubrick, the artificer of slow-moving “sublime” movies like “2001,” “The Shining,” and “Barry Lyndon.” Many of us who loved the drive and the sardonic wit of such movies as “The Killing” (1956), “Paths of Glory” (1957), “Lolita” (1962), and “Strangelove” never loved the late films, with their glacial pacing and coldly sarcastic tableaux, in the same way.

“Strangelove” is an enraging struggle between reason and madness, between three-dimensional characters and men devoted, in the old usage, to “humors”—a fixed obsession that limits their responses, a comic device that goes back to Ben Jonson’s plays, or earlier. The camera lodges beneath Sterling Hayden’s chin—his Ripper has the certainty of megalomania, with a clenched cigar pointing skyward like an artillery piece. By contrast, the super-rational President (in a devastating parody of the blandly suave Democratic Party hero Adlai Stevenson) is shot in a level stare, and so is Lionel Mandrake (Sellers again), the R.A.F. officer attached to General Ripper, who speaks with stern British probity and gets nowhere with his boss. The movie is a kind of awed testimonial to the power of madness and an expression of contempt for sweet reason, which comes off as hapless.

There are actually some standard heroes in the movie: the crew of the B-52, who fly over the frozen north and head toward a Soviet target. As in an old Second World War adventure picture, like “Air Force” or “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo,” the bomber crew is ethnically mixed—in this case, a Texan, a black man, a Jew, and so on. They are about to blow up the world, yet they go through the professional routines of any other bomber crew; the discrepancy between their competence and what’s at stake is excruciating. It’s part of the fiendish malice of the movie that we find ourselves, with a queasy stomach, rooting for the men to complete their mission. Such is the power of movie narrative! Our boys! Doing their job, sacrificing themselves, gamely steering the plane in the right direction even after it’s been partially incapacitated by a Soviet missile. In effect, we wind up satirizing ourselves. Slim Pickens, as the pilot, achieved immortality by riding an H-bomb as it fell, yahooing and whipping his cowboy hat back and forth like a rodeo champion.

Most of the reviews were good, though Bosley Crowther, in the Times, found much that was “grave and dangerous.” Crowther went on, “I am troubled by the feeling, which runs all through the film, of discredit and even contempt for our whole defense establishment, up to and even including the hypothetical Commander in Chief.” Crowther found the ending “malefic.” Crowther’s philistinism was notorious, but there were far better writers who were also disturbed by “Strangelove.” Pauline Kael wrote that “ ‘Dr. Strangelove’ was clearly intended as a cautionary movie: it meant to jolt us awake to the dangers of the bomb by showing us the insanity of the course we were pursuing. But artists’ warnings about war and the dangers of total annihilation never tell us how we are supposed to regain control, and ‘Dr. Strangelove,’ chortling over madness, did not indicate any possibilities for sanity.” In the same vein, Susan Sontag asserted that, in future decades, “the display of negative thinking” in the movie would seem “facile.” And Sontag wrote that “Dr. Strangelove is nihilism for the masses, a philistine nihilism.”

I find both of these sets of remarks strange. Why should a popular artist have any obligation to propose “sane” solutions to an intolerable situation? Surely it’s enough to expose with overwhelming comic energy the contradictions and paradoxes of “mutual assured destruction.” Sane actions are the business of scientists, the military, and Presidents, a few of whom may have been roused to act by this movie. (When Ronald Reagan entered the White House, he wanted to see the war room. This gives one pause. But, later, working with Mikhail Gorbachev, he brought about a partial reduction of nuclear weapons by both sides.) And Sontag’s distaste for “Strangelove” feels off. It’s actually a “cheerful film,” she says. Well, yes, that’s the point of the joke. The movie teases the many Americans acquiescing in a mad logic. At the end, Strangelove leaping out of his chair, and General Turgidson warning of a “mine-shaft gap” with the Soviet Union, are continuing their assertion of high acumen. For them, the game of “strategy” just continues. Sontag wanted a serious film, but I don’t see how anyone could miss, under all the buffoonery and juvenile joking, a furious sense of outrage.